Zombies march on Sarah Palin campaign event, as they do in Halting State (although this seems to have been planned well in advance, and that was a flashmob). Charlie couldn’t predict Sarah Palin, however; politics can always outweird science fiction. Relatedly, the BT 21CN network upgrade always promised to unearth a ton of weird things…
Read More World of Charlie Stross WatchYer ORGANISE project. Right. There’s been some activity lately; specifically, there’s a new and more detailed spec (available here), a separate and improved section on the design philosophy (here), and some embryonic requirements/notes on implementation (here). Thanks to contributors. Meanwhile, something interesting; you look at stories like this and this with suitable awe. As Mark…
Read More Organise, and pissing off the right peopleIt all started with this Making Light thread; Bill Higgins was musing about improvising a radiation detector, which led him to this deeply cool device – scroll down for the cunning methodology that goes with it. But James MacDonald beat him, I think, with this cloud chamber implementation: Field-expedient cloud chamber:Needed: shot glass. High-proof vodka…
Read More Homemade particle physicsJust to say that the Viktorfeed/Google Maps mashup is now working, and it’s here. Relatedly, the URL for the GeoRSS feed is changing; replace seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk/viktorfeed.xml with www.harrowell.org.uk/viktorfeed.xml.
Read More participatory panopticon python programming postGood post from Jeff Atwood about cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. One thing that comes to mind is that this is an example of the best kind of security exploit – one where the exploit depends on the target system doing the right thing. A Web server is meant to respond to URL requests, and…
Read More CSRF, and a blegWhat have we here? Via Spencer Ackerman: David Wurmser, trying to sketch the wiring in his head on a really big piece of paper. The spider chart was meant “to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change,” Wurmser said. “It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say,…
Read More All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfyMet up with regular reader and Linux hacker Duane Griffin to discuss the ORGANISE project . As a result, here’s a new and much amended specification that supersedes the first one.
Read More In which we review the Organise projectYou’d think someone who specialises in blogging about “public diplomacy” would notice when someone refloats a rah rah painted school success story from 2003. Iraqna didn’t “happen”; Orascom built it back then, and didn’t we all hear so much about how Iraqis had mobile phones? You didn’t hear so much, outside the trade, about how…
Read More Well, what about those Iraqi MOBILE PHONES? EH? EH?So I took my stupid damn idea off to the stupid ideas club. When we got there, guess who? Spyblog was waiting at the rendezvous with some Dutchmen and an Argentine documentarist and half the No2ID members not currently in hospital. And after we made our way through Jock McZanu’s EU Maddie monsoon (GOOD HERE…
Read More Organise, and a very wet 2600I’ve been reading the oohing and aahing about the Obama web operation (for example, here at the Linux Journal); all those individual pages and RSS feeds and iCals for every event. It strikes me that some of this can be generalised, and that we can probably improve on it. After all, as LJ points out,…
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